Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is an industry that has been growing rapidly in the recent year and involves outsourcing of legal works by the legal communities of the developed countries like the US to lower wage developing countries like India.

LPO usually involves processes like Legal Research, Document Drafting, legal contracts, agreements, client letters, patent applications and various other Intellectual Property research and Paralegal Services.

LPO is increasingly being preferred these days because it has become a time consuming and expensive process, mainly triggered by data explosion, technological evolution, and the sudden increase in electronic stored information. One cannot also deny the fact that US practices lack consistent teams to perform document review work.

Document review in the context of litigation is done in two levels. The first level of document review is the discovery phase and first part in any litigation. This process is performed after receiving the legal "request for production of documents". During this process the objective is to reduce the document set into a workable and responsive data set. Even though the e-discovery best practices have reduced a data set by almost 70% there still may remain millions of documents to be reviewed. This is because the total quantity of documents has multiplied several times over the years. In the second level these workable documents are reviewed more seriously by seniors.

As legal document review forms the major part of litigation expenses today law firms are trying out all methods to reduce the cost of litigation and outsourcing of e-discovery is a viable solution. During the document review process quite often millions of documents have to be searched and identified for

• Case relevance
• Confidentiality
• Privileged /protection
• "key or "hot" status

Besides in litigation, document review is also performed in matters of regulatory compliance and corporate due diligence.

The India based LPO services are a great boon in this regard because, attorneys in India doing the work come from the best law schools with a good understanding of the US legal system. They also use the best e-discovery technology, tools and processes and implement the highest level of security.